It’s almost time to adjust the time on clocks and watches, and for many people, to finally figure out how to set the time on their microwave ovens.
Daylight Saving Time (DST) — often misstated as Daylight Savings Time — will end this Sunday at 2 am, and clocks should be turned back one hour.
In 2008, the U.S. Energy Department studied the impact of the extended Daylight Saving Time (bit.ly/DSTeffects) on energy consumption in the U.S., and found that the extra four weeks of Daylight Saving Time saved about 1.3 billion kilowatt-hours — which could power over 100,000 households for an entire year.
However, a recent study published in the journal Epidemiology (bit.ly/DSTdepression) concludes that the transition from summertime to standard time is associated with an increase in the incidence of depressive episodes. “We speculate that the distress associated with the sudden advancement of sunset, which marks the coming of a long period of short days, accounts for this finding,” the study concludes.
Germany was the first country to implement Daylight Saving Time in 1916 to conserve resources during World War I.
The United States adopted DST toward the end of World War I and then again during World War II, but between 1945 and 1966, there was no federal law to regulate it. The resulting confusion between states led to Congress passing the Uniform Time Act to establish consistency between states.
In 2005, the Energy Policy Act extended the observance of DST in the United States by four weeks.
Clocks will spring forward again on March 12, 2017.
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